Vietnam repression
HANOI - International human rights groups and U.S.
politicians are trying to convince Vietnam to address reports
of torture and other abuses of political dissidents, as well as
of religious and ethnic-minority groups.
"It is necessary to say there are
no political prisoners and nobody
is detained for their thought, only
criminals who are detained for
violating the law," Foreign Ministry
spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh
said.
Illegal protests are orchestrated
by anti-communists who were allied with America during the
Vietnam War, according to the government.
Government-run media blames FULRO, the French
acronym for the United Front for the Liberation of
Oppressed Races, which fought alongside U.S. forces.
But trouble has erupted in scattered regions, for a variety
of reasons, according to human rights groups and Vietnamese
dissidents.
"Major violations" by Vietnamese officials included "police
torture of people in detention or during interrogation,
including beating, kicking and shocking with electric batons,"
said New York-based Human Rights Watch in a recent
report.
"Violations of the right to freedom of religion, include
destruction and closure of ethnic-minority Protestant
churches, and official pressure on Christians to abandon their
religion under threat of legal action or imprisonment," the
group said.
Titled "Repression of Montagnards," the 194-page report
released in April focused on Vietnam's Central Highlands in
and around Pleiku, including the provinces of Kon Tum, Dak
Lak, Gia Lai and Lam Dong.
Vietnam is bursting with 80 million people who are
crammed into the S-shaped nation along the South China
Sea.
Highland tribes are struggling against the relentless arrival
of Vietnamese lowlanders — majority ethnic Kinh and other
groups — who want to farm the prized coffee-growing zone.
Hanoi fears Highlanders, many of whom are Protestant
Christians, are protecting their region because they want to
create an autonomous Degar homeland.
Degar people are indigenous inhabitants — numbering a
few hundred thousand — in the Central Highlands plateaus.
These 40 or so tribes are known collectively as
Montagnards — French for "mountaineers."
"We have suffered a fate similar to the Native Americans,
Australian Aboriginals, African bushmen and other original
inhabitants subjected to invasion and exploitation by
outsiders," according to the Spartanburg, S.C.-based
Montagnard Foundation.
Hanoi avoids international censure "by playing on the guilt
of the Vietnam War" and hobbling domestic and international
media investigating human rights, the foundation said.
The New York-based Fund for Reconciliation and
Development (FRD), however, recently issued a watch list
titled, "Home Grown Terrorism?" naming U.S.-based
"immigrant groups" that "support insurgencies in Indochina."
"Reminiscent of the darkest days of the Cold War the
most colorful and dangerous" groups include the Montagnard
Foundation, it warned.
"The foundation's activities are supported by a group of
U.S. Special Forces veterans," the FRD said.
In recent months, amid protests and crackdowns, about
1,000 Montagnards fled west across the border into
Cambodia.
Many were eventually allowed to resettle in the United
States.
Vietnam's Montagnards include thousands of people who
converted from their tribal animist beliefs to become
Protestants after being recruited by the United States during
the Vietnam War.
Today, Protestant churches hidden in villagers' homes
have increased their flock by preaching in minority languages,
drawing the wrath of Vietnamese authorities, who consider
the churches illegal.
Catholics also face problems.
Catholic priest Tadeus Nguyen Van Ly was blocked from
traveling to Washington last year to speak to the U.S.
Commission on International Religious Freedom.
He was later arrested by Vietnamese officials for
providing purportedly false written evidence to the United
States about human rights violations.
The cleric's action violated Article 13 of the Vietnamese
Constitution, which forbids any activity perceived as
opposing the independence, sovereignty, reunification or
territorial integrity of Vietnam, officials said.
In 1995, the priest, based in Hue, was released after 10
years in jail for his dissident behavior.
His current demands include the return of church land,
which the communists seized in 1975 when the war ended.
"Despite a marked increase in religious practice among the
Vietnamese people in the last 10 years, the Vietnamese
government continues to suppress organized religious
activities forcefully and to monitor and control religious
communities," the U.S. Commission on International Religious
Freedom said in a report last year.
"This repression is mirrored by the recent crackdown on
important political dissidents," it said.
The strongest anti-communist challenge comes from the
illegal Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV).
The UBCV's leader, dissident Buddhist monk Thich
Quang Do, spent more than 18 years in prison or house
arrest before being released in 1998.
Vietnam's "one-party totalitarianism" and "cruel
dictatorship" has resulted in "our people being enslaved
spiritually and materially, our morality degraded, and our
country weakened and paralyzed," he said last year.
Thich Quang Do's defiant declaration, now posted on
various Web sites, also requests U.N.-supervised elections
for "political parties of all inclination, except the Communist
Party."
London-based Amnesty International meanwhile
condemned "the continuing repression of non-official religious
groups in Vietnam in flagrant contradiction to the Vietnamese
government's assertion of freedom of religion."
Hanoi denies all accusations of human rights abuses and
insists its actions are within the law.
Any crackdowns were merely the authorities enforcing the
law to prevent the sort of anarchy that has swept other
impoverished nations, officials said.
Some foreign analysts warn a harsh U.S. response —
such as trade sanctions — may alienate Vietnam and push it
closer to China, without helping dissident groups.
Official corruption and a stagnant economy, however,
fuels unrest among many Vietnamese.
Villagers' traditional animist beliefs are also frowned upon
by communist officials, who worry that "superstition" and
other supernatural concepts make people irrational, wasteful
and subject to exploitation.
But Vietnamese officials forced some detainees to
perform animist-style rituals to demonstrate they are not
Christians, according to Human Rights Watch.
"Beginning in June [2001], provincial authorities
conducted dozens of ceremonies in the Central Highlands in
which Montagnards who had participated in the February
demonstrations were forced to read confessions about their
alleged wrongdoings and renounce Christianity in front of
entire villages, sealing their pledges by mandatory drinking of
rice wine mixed with goat's blood," the human rights group
said.
By Richard S. Ehrlich - The Washington Times - June 07, 2002.
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